Re: Tim Sherwood - Head Coach
My thoughts are pretty well summed up in this article:
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2008/dec/18/4231-442-tactics-jonathan-wilson
(sorry to infect your browser with communism by going to that site
)
Especially the bit at the end about midfield flexibility. The 4-3-3/4-2-3-1/4-5-1 can become so many other formations with an individual's role changing very little and with very few adjustments to allow that. I don't believe the same can be said about 4-4-2 - mainly because of the way the midfield is set out. A player like Ade can drop deep to make a 4-5-1 or a 4-4-1-1 but that's not the same as the Eriksen/Siggy type that would normally inhabit that role. The 'wonky' goes some way to solving that problem - it allows you to play a creator-type without using one of your midfield two roles for it. Problem is, if that creator is tucked into the midfield to make up numbers then they're not where they can do the most danger in transition from defence to attack. One of your strikers is also likely to be out very wide to cover the width that your creator has left when tucking in to make up numbers.
The alternative is to give up the midfield battle, but that's not for me. Firstly it means you'll almost certainly lose to a good team, but secondly (and most importantly) I want to see my team passing the ball around and playing football, not chasing around whilst the opposition plays football.
OK so I had a read at this. It's a good article. Strangely it seems to both support and argue against my points regarding 442.
Further back in the thread I'd mentioned that it is the players chosen and how the manager sets up the team that dictates the formation when in posession of the ball. So although you start the game in a 442 formation, once in possession that changes. The article states something similar here;
'a side playing 4-4-2, with the wingers pushed high and one of the centre-forward dropping deep, is effectively playing a 4-2-3-1. When Manchester United beat Barcelona in the 1991 Cup-Winners' Cup final, for instance, they had Bryan Robson and Paul Ince holding, with Lee Sharpe and Mike Phelan wide, and Brian McClair dropping off Mark Hughes. Everybody still referred to it as 4-4-2, but it was in effect a 4-2-3-1.'
"It was the most symmetrical way I could find of playing with four forwards. One of the great advantages is that having the forwards high allows you to play the midfield high and the defence high, so everybody benefits.
You can do this with any formation. It's just a case of working the space and defending from the front.
Which actually is the point of tactics: to achieve this mulitplier effect on the players' abilities.
Supports my point that you play a system which suits the players at your disposal rather than employ a system and force fit players into it.
The changes to the interpretation of the offside law mean that defences tend to play deeper these days, and the game is therefore more stretched than it was even a decade ago; given that, it is perhaps logical to split the midfield into holders and creators and so play in four bands rather than three.
This is a fair point. Although you could argue (as the article sets out at the beginning), that playing two holding midfielders, two attacking wide players and a centre forward that drops deep in a 442 will end up playing as four bands rather than three due to the nature of the players.
All of which begs the question of whether, given many 4-4-2s were effectively 4-2-3-1s, it matters what we call it. Should we really hail Lillo as a pioneer, when his breakthrough was to do self-consciously and give a name to something that was already happening? Isolating and naming something, though, as Wittgenstein argues, is a highly significant step. Once an idea is understood fully enough that it can be described by a simple term – 4-2-3-1 – then work can begin on developing it. What happened in Spain in the early part of this decade, as the basic template moved from 4-4-2 to 4-2-3-1, was nothing less than a paradigm shift.
I suppose the bold is the crux of my point really. He makes a fair point that once it is understood it can be developed, although once you set your team up in that specific formation as a starting point you lose the unknown factor of setting them up in a 442 but having players move in ways that are not expected of your traditional 442.
His points about midfield flexibility are good but I don't agree with him that the attractive and successful football is a result of the system Barcelona play. The players they have are the key thing here (obviously system is a factor, but not the ,ajor one).
For me, the major sentence in the article is this one;
All tactical systems are relative and, as Lillo stresses, all are reliant on the players available and circumstance.
If TS feels that he can get more out of the players starting with a 442 formation than 4231 then that is the formation he should go with, nomatter the opposition. If, when he has everyone fit, he feels he can get most out of them playing 442, 433 or 451 or 4231 then that's the formation he should go with, again no-matter the opposition.
